Transcript
Introduction
It must have been sometime in 1979 that I first heard the words, but James, if there were a better kind of vacuum cleaner, Hoover would have invented it? "That was just before I left the first company that I had set up. I gave up security, income and respectability and persuaded an old friend to come in with me on a project that I was developing in the garage behind my house.
For 12 years, I labored under heavier and heavier debt. I tried and failed to interest the major manufacturing companies in my product. I fought terrible legal battles on both sides of the Atlantic to protect my vacuum cleaner. And in 1992, 13 years later in the cold, wet English countryside, I went into production on my own as sole owner of the machine I had conceived, designed, built, and tested alone.
After thousands of prototypes and modifications and millions of tests, I was in terrible debt but in love with the Cyclone. By 2002, one in four British households owned a Dyson. My company was selling 1 million vacuum cleaners a year and turning over 300 million annually. And my products had achieved total worldwide sales of more than $10 billion. Finally, late last year, I fitted the last and most important piece of the jigsaw. I entered the biggest, most innovative, most exciting market in the world. I came to America. This is the story of how I did it."
That was an excerpt from the book that I just read for the fourth time and the one that we're going to talk about today, which is Against the Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson. If you ask me for like a top 10 list of my recommendations of books that I cover on the podcast you should read, that is -- kind of that top 10 list is always changing. The #1 spot never changes. It is this book by far. This book was actually published over 25 years ago. He has since written a second autobiography that came out a few years ago. If you want to listen to that episode, it is Episode 205 for the sequel. James Dyson was 50 when he publishes this book, and he was 74 when he published his second autobiography.
And so I want to jump into the introduction. We'll see right away, the reason this is my #1 recommendation is because 90% of this book is about the struggle to build his company. And so he says, the funny thing about the story of the dual Dyson Cyclone is that I knew it would all turn out like this from the beginning. Despite all the setbacks, the lawsuit, the cash crises, the ridicule, the bad feelings, and the doubt, I always knew deep down.